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The New Zealand Open Source Society is a charitable, non-profit organisation set up to educate, advocate and advance the use of Free and Open Source Software in Government, Business and Society in New Zealand.
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New to Free and Open Source Software? Learn how to educate, advocate and advance the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in New Zealand.
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I Want to Help

We exist to share the freedom of open source software, open standards, and open information for the benefit of New Zealand. Do you want to help?
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We (the NZOSS) encourage our members to read and contribute to this. Regardless of your political stripe, fleshing out this open document and discussing its implications will further our society's aims. All credit to the Greens for embracing free and open source methods and values in developing this policy platform.

Wednesday 22 April 2014

A Champion for Internet Rights and Freedoms

Championing Internet rights and freedoms, the Green Party has today launched New Zealand's first ever crowdsourced Internet Rights and Freedoms Bill.

Auckland Transport, AUT and software development house Propellorhead are running HACKAKL, a event that will bring developers together bring Innovation, Community, Open Source, Networking and Technology together to promote Open Data and Open Government.

Leaks of the text of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement show that the United States would like to reverse the work done by the NZOSS to exclude software from patentability in New Zealand. The TPPA may also introduce copyright enforcement regimes that would give large companies the right to censor the Internet as currently occurs in the United States under the DMCA.

Many studies of the quality of source code shows that Open Source is better quality than closed source. It is however no gaurantee of quality. While Open Source has allowed companies to leverage a community and common resources it has also meant that many projects have been taken for granted. An example is OpenSSL, which recently was found to have a vulnerability which has been dubbed HeartBleed.

So, you're an open source developer or tech expert and you want to move to New Zealand... what do you need to know? Here're some informal tips from someone who's been there and done that (but is not an immigration lawyer!): I moved to NZ in 1994 from the US and later started a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development and services company, which I ran for 14 years. Although there's certainly plenty of interesting FOSS stuff going on that I don't know about, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how things work here now.

In last week's third instalment of this series, I looked at ways you can deploy and manage FOSS solutions at an organisational scale, including support for legacy Windows XP applications. A great deal has changed since the heyday of XP - we now have to accommodate a broad range of other devices in addition to the desktop monoculture of yesteryear.

As members of the Fair Deal Coalition (both the homegrown initiative and internationally), we (the NZOSS) want to make sure this attached press release and open letter to NZ's Government representatives and TPPA (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) negotiators are distributed widely.